As the American West, parched by prolonged drought, braces for a season of potentially record-breaking wildfires, new research suggests these events not only pose an immediate threat to people's safety and their homes, but also could take a toll on human health, agriculture and ecosystems. The study, appearing in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology, could help societies map out a plan to mitigate these effects in wildfire-prone regions.
Earth
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Women are up to 83 percent more likely to experience repeat abuse by their male partners if a weapon is used in the initial abuse incident, according to a new study that has implications for victims, counselors and police.
Michigan State University researcher Amy Bonomi and colleagues studied the domestic abuse police reports of nearly 6,000 couples in Seattle during a two-year period. An estimated one in four women in the United States experience domestic violence at least once in their lifetime.
Researchers at New York University have developed a method for creating and directing fast moving waves in magnetic fields that have the potential to enhance communication and information processing in computer chips and other consumer products.
MIAMI – A new study led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science uncovered a previously unknown magma chamber deep below the most active volcano in the world – Kilauea. This is the first geophysical observation that large magma chambers exist in the deeper parts of the volcano system.
Cambridge, Mass. – January 28, 2014 – Scientists at Harvard University and the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) hope new understanding of the natural nanoscale photonic device that enables a small marine animal to dynamically change its colors will inspire improved protective camouflage for soldiers on the battlefield.
In a University of Oklahoma-led study, researchers discovered an additional active process, not excluding an extraterrestrial event, that may have led to high concentrations of nanodiamonds in Younger Dryas-age sediments and in sediments less than 3,000 years old. Findings from quantifying sediments of different periods along the Bull Creek valley in the Oklahoma Panhandle suggest the distribution of nanodiamonds was not unique to the Younger Dryas sediments.
Air pollution from Asia has been rising for several decades but Hawaii had seemed to escape the ozone pollution that drifts east with the springtime winds. Now a team of researchers has found that shifts in atmospheric circulation explain the trends in Hawaiian ozone pollution.
Boulder, Colo., USA – Learn more about river morphology in Oregon; coastal responses to sea level; the Tertiary Sabzevar Range, Iran; carbon-dioxide sequestration; fault systems in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica; Villarrica Volcano, Chile; landslide modeling; the southern Bighorn Arch, Wyoming; high-diversity plant fossil assemblages of the Salamanca Formation, Argentina; Upper Cretaceous strata, Western Interior Seaway; stratigraphy in Italy; the Soreq drainage, Israel; faulting in Surprise Valley, California; and the Qiantang River estuary, eastern China.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Jan. 27, 2014 – Nearly 30 years after the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, many questions remain, but an Oak Ridge National Laboratory team is providing insight that could lead to better superconductors.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2014 — After several years and millions of views, the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society, is bidding farewell to its popular YouTube series Bytesize Science. But you can't keep a great chemistry video series down for long.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Researchers from Brown University have shown experimentally that a boron-based competitor to graphene is a very real possibility.
"I didn't see it, because I wasn't expecting it there," might be the more accurate excuse for motorists who have just crashed into a bus or a motorcycle. The mere fact that such vehicles are less common than cars on our roads actually makes it harder for drivers to notice them, says Vanessa Beanland of The Australian National University. Beanland and colleagues conducted research at Monash University on how the so-called "low-prevalence effect" increases the likelihood of accidents. The study is published in Springer's journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.
New types of solotronic structures, including the world's first quantum dots containing single cobalt ions, have been created and studied at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw. The materials and elements used to form these structures allow us forecast new trends in solotronics – a field of experimental electronics and spintronics of the future, based on operations occurring on a single-atom level.
An article entitled "Geologic characteristics of the Chang'E-3 exploration region"was published online for SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy on January 21, 2014. It presents some new results on the geologic characteristics of the Chang'E-3 exploration region.
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have shown that deep sea fault zones could transport much larger amounts of water from the Earth's oceans to the upper mantle than previously thought.
Seismologists at Liverpool have estimated that over the age of the Earth, the Japan subduction zone alone could transport the equivalent of up to three and a half times the water of all the Earth's oceans to its mantle.